(iii) to adopt, by mutual agreement, decisions on policies which, in each area of law, are applied separately in the relevant areas, which fall within the competence of the two administrations, north and south; 1. The Participants note that the development of a peaceful environment on the basis of this Agreement can and should mean the standardisation of security measures and practices. One way to answer this question of freedom of choice is to examine SDLP leader Seamus Mallon`s much-cited aphorism that the 1998 agreement is “Sunningdale for slow learners.” 91 His statement implies that, had there been “faster” learners in 1973/74, power-sharing and North-South cooperation would have been successful much earlier, on the basis of the principle of consent, and that the war could have ended much earlier.92 Nevertheless, it is difficult to see that there was much in the context of the violence of the early years of unrest, What union leader Brian Faulkner was, or any other union leader could have done it to garner union support for power-sharing, or that another British prime minister (let alone another Taoiseach) could have opposed the Sunningdale agreement through violence or deception by the fierce unionist opposition. Similarly, it is unclear who within the IRA could have endured the day in favour of accepting the legitimacy of a newly formed Northern Ireland assembly and the Unionist veto on Irish unification. (It is remarkable that Adams himself was pushed to the head by his criticism of the 1975 IRA ceasefire.) 93 Finally, it appears that there was no plausible Conservative leader (let alone a Labour) who could have imposed the agreement on violent unionist opposition. In other words, Sunningdale failed, not because of poor leadership (or a “slow learner”), but because the circumstances were not favorable for an agreement that embodied the key principles of consent, power-sharing, and cross-border institutions. In other words, the structural changes that were just beginning to develop after the unrest began were a necessary condition for the adoption of the proposed framework, but they were rejected in 1973 by both Sinn Fein/IRA and trade unionists. . . .